At midnight on June 4, around 2800 kitchen staff, orderlies and hospital cleaners were set to be locked out of their workplaces by four contracting companies — Spotless, OCS, ISS and Compass — in hospitals across New Zealand. However, last-minute negotiations between the Service and Food Workers Union Nga Ringa Tota (SFWU) and the District Health Board averted the lockout.
The crisis began when the DHB and the contract companies walked out of negotiations with the SFWU, refusing to consider an offer by the union. The negotiations were being held to settle a nine-month dispute over a national agreement on wages and conditions. When the union responded by issuing strike notices to the companies, the contractors threatened a lockout.
The threat to lock out the workers was a vicious attack on some of New Zealand's lowest paid workers and would have had a huge impact on health and safety within the hospitals.
Following the late negotiations, both the union's strike notices and the companies' lockout notices were withdrawn. The DHB's latest offer is for a small increase in pay rates and lifting the entry level pay rate. However, other issues are still to be resolved.
The SFWU and its members have suspended industrial action for a week and will only call off planned strikes if demands for equal pay for members in the regions are met.
In 2006, the SFWU launched a campaign for a single national multi-employer collective agreement for SFWU members in the District Health Boards, pay parity with health-care assistants employed by the DHBs, and parity of conditions — such as sick, bereavement and annual leave, public holiday provisions and penalty rates — with other workers employed in the DHBs.
One of the contractors, Spotless, is an Australian company that employs 20,000 workers in Australia and New Zealand. It has a history of treating workers badly in both countries. Last year, Spotless forced 14- and 15-year old workers at major sporting events in Melbourne to get an Australian Business Number so that they could be treated as self-employed and paid by commission instead of wages.